General FAQ
From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free ebooks.
About Project Gutenberg
G.1. What is Project Gutenberg?
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works.
G.2. Where did Project Gutenberg come from?
In 1971, Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time on a mainframe of the era. Trying to figure out how to put these very expensive hours to good use, he envisaged a time when there would be millions of connected computers, and typed in the Declaration of Independence (all in upper case--there was no lower case available!). His idea was that everybody who had access to a computer could have a copy of the text. Now, 31 years later, his copy of the Declaration of Independence (with lower-case added!) is still available to everyone on the Internet.
During the 70s, he added some more classic American texts, and through the 80s worked on the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare. That edition of Shakespeare was never released, due to copyright law changes, but others followed.
Starting in 1991, Project Gutenberg began to take its current form, with many different texts and defined targets. The target for 1991 was one book a month. 1992's target was two books a month. This target doubled every year through 1996, when it hit 32 books a month.
G.3. What has Project Gutenberg achieved?
Project Gutenberg is the original, and oldest, etext project on the Internet, founded in 1971.
As of August 2006, we are not only still going, we have made over 19,000 eBooks available, with an average of 400 more being added each month.
We have many mirrors (copies) of our archives on all seven continents.
G.4. Who runs Project Gutenberg?
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization. Dr. Gregory B. Newby is our volunteer CEO. Professor Michael Hart is our Founder and Executive Director.
In terms of the day-to-day production of eBooks, our volunteers run themselves. :-) They produce books, and submit them when completed. Our Production Directors help with general volunteer issues. The Posting Team check submitted texts and shepherd them onto our servers. You can find current contact information for these people on the Contact Information page.
G.5. How many people are in Project Gutenberg?
It depends how you count them. We don't do roll-calls or give out membership cards. At the end of 2003, Distributed Proofreaders sees maybe 400 people turn up to do some proofing each day, Distributed Proofreaders Europe another 50 or so, and not everyone works through the DP sites. It would be a reasonable guess that 2,000 or so people will be doing some work for PG this month.
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G.9. What is the relationship between Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg of Europe, Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Project Gutenberg of Australia, and Project Runeberg?
These are all entirely separate organizations. Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Project Gutenberg Europe, and Project Gutenberg of Australia use the "Project Gutenberg" trademark with permission, and they operate within the copyright rules of their respective countries. Project Runeberg has no specific connection with Project Gutenberg; we both have the same aims, but Project Runeberg specializes in Nordic literature.
About Project Gutenberg publications
G.10. Does Project Gutenberg publish only books?
No.
Project Gutenberg also publishes other cultural works like movies and music, but the bulk of our collection is books.
G.11. What books does Project Gutenberg publish?
Any books that we legally can, and that our volunteers want to work on.
We cannot publish any texts still in copyright without permission. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright FAQ explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)
So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.
These books are chosen by our volunteers. Simply, a volunteer decides that a certain book should be in the archives, obtains the book and does the work necessary to turn it into an e-text. If you're interested in volunteering, see the Volunteers' FAQ.
G.12. What other things does Project Gutenberg publish?
We have published some music files, in MIDI and MUS formats. We have published the Human Genome. We have published pictures of the prehistoric cave painting from the south of France. We have published some video files and some audio files, including a Janis Ian track and readings from public domain books.
G.13. How does Project Gutenberg choose books to publish?
Project Gutenberg, as such, does not choose books to publish. There is no central list of works that volunteers are asked to work on. Individual volunteers choose and produce books according to their own tastes and values, and the availability (or price!) of the book.
G.14. What languages does Project Gutenberg publish in?
Whatever languages we can! As above, this is decided by what languages our volunteers choose to work with.
G.15. Why don't you have any / many books about history, geography, science, biography, etc.? Why aren't there any / more PG books available in French, Spanish, German, etc.?
If we can legally publish a book, and it isn't in the archives, it's because no volunteer has produced it yet. At the moment, we have a predominance of English language novels because that is what most people have chosen to work on.
We're always looking for new languages and topics, and always delighted to see people producing them. If we don't have enough of the types of books you would like to see, why don't you help us out by contributing one? If the people interested in a particular area don't contribute, we'll always be short in that area.
G.16. Why don't you have any books by Stephen King, Tom Clancy, Tolkien, etc.?
Project Gutenberg can publish only books that are in the public domain Copyright FAQ unless we have the permission of the copyright holder. Current bestsellers have not yet entered the public domain, and we're not likely to get permission from the authors to publish them.
G.17. Why is Project Gutenberg so set on using Plain Vanilla ASCII?
Don't misrepresent us--we support and publish many open formats, but, yes, we do want to have a plain text version of everything possible.
We're looking at our history, and we're planning for the long term--the very long term.
Today, Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world. This has been so for over thirty years, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. We've seen formats and extended character sets come and go; plain text stays with us. We can still read Shakespeare's First Folios, the original Gutenberg Bible, the Domesday Book, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone (though we may have trouble with the language!), but we can't read many files made in various formats on computer media just 20 years ago.
We're trying to build an archive that will last not only decades, but centuries.
The point of putting works in the PG archive is that they are copied to many, many public sites and individual computers all over the world. No single disaster can destroy them; no single government can suppress them. Long after we're all dead and gone, when the very concept of an ISP is as quaint as gas streetlamps, when HTML reads like Middle English, those texts will still be safe, copied, and available to our descendants.
The PG archive is so valuable, yet free and easily portable, that even if every current PG volunteer vanished overnight, people around the world would copy and preserve it.
If the ZIP format loses popularity, and is replaced by better compression, it will be easy to convert the zip formats automatically (and we post all plain-text files in unzipped format as well). If hard drives are replaced by optical memory, it will be easy to copy the files onto that. If even ASCII is superseded by Unicode or one of its descendants, it will be possible for our grandchildren to convert it automatically (and ASCII is included in Unicode anyway).
By contrast, many of us have files saved in proprietary formats from word-processors only 5 or 10 years old that are already impractical for us to read. Some of our files produced just a few years ago using non-ASCII character sets like Codepage 850 are already giving problems for some readers. Some eBook reader formats launched within the last few years are already obsolete. We have learned from that experience.
We also encourage other open formats based on plain text, like HTML and XML, and even occasionally not-so-open ones when simple formatting isn't enough, but plain text is the only format we're sure of in a rapidly-changing technological landscape.
Please see also the File Formats FAQ for more detailed discussion of formats.
